


All the things you leave behind

by UnofficialLurker



Category: The Get Down (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-20
Updated: 2017-06-20
Packaged: 2018-11-16 11:43:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11252460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UnofficialLurker/pseuds/UnofficialLurker
Summary: Zeke's life between the end of the series, and his show at the start of the episodes. And a little bit after.





	All the things you leave behind

**Author's Note:**

> Don't own anything. Also, I'm really bad at titles.

He’d all but forgotten about the recording the tech had done of him, after Mylene had finished, and left, when the call came. How they’d found his number was a mystery. He was busy with college, moving on with his life without Shao, without Mylene, without music. He still wrote, because he couldn’t sleep when he didn’t and he needed sleep to manage school.

Then the record company called his aunt’s phone and told him they’d found his recording, and that it was exactly the thing just breaking, just hitting the music industry, and did he have more? 

They set up a meeting, and he went, with his worried, defensive aunt. It took the label a lot of talking to convince her that dealing drugs wasn’t part of their business. Though, truth to be told, Zeke still isn’t sure she ever believed it, even now. 

It amazes him now, that he was so lucky, and the label didn’t screw him completely. A kid, not knowing the first thing about what he was getting into; he would have agreed to just about anything. But the people he met with were young and idealistic too, and played him mostly fair. 

For a while he tried to please his aunt and her boyfriend and stay in school, make sure there was a future no matter what happened with his music, but the roller-coaster picked up speed, and his first record sold well. The support from Grandmaster Flash helped with that. Soon, he made more money than he could have imagined. 

He stayed in Bronx as long as he could, but the record companies, and Mylene, were on the west coast, so eventually, he caved and moved. That’s when he changed his name, became Books again. A way to stay true to where he’d started.

Mylenes star had risen fast, and faded faster. Disco was ending, and she was reduced to a pretty girl with a good voice, and that wasn’t enough. His star rose, and hers faded. He tried to make it work with them anyway, but she could never live with him surpassing her. The divorce broke his heart, and made him flee Los Angeles, and go back to New York. 

By then, he was bigger than the wildest dreams he’d had when he, Dizzy, Boo, Ra-Ra, and Shao had spun and rapped on the streets and in the clubs. That made him easy to find, and Ra-Ra did. He’d gone on to study, married, had children, and cold tell Zeke about the friends he’d lost touch with. Dizzy and Shao were both dead, Dizzy and Thor had both died from Aids, in the early years of the disease, before anyone really knew what it was or how to deal with it. Shao had gotten too deep into Fat Annie’s world, and died in some shooting. Boo had done his time for the drug dealing, and was now slipping forth and back between legal and illegal dealings. Zeke and Ra-Ra never became the kind of friends they had used to be, but stayed in touch.

Ra-Ra popping back up in his life, reminding him of where it had all begun, was what made him start writing about the past, of where he came from. Before, most of his lyrics had been political commentaries, but now he wrote his own story. His past, his hopes back then, the dreams crashing, the disillusion in a boy who’d though he didn’t have any illusions, and about the dream changing, taking new shape, and the air under his wings, carrying him away, and then back home again. 

After the record with his origin story, and the tour that went with it, Mylene contacted him again. For the first time in longer than he cared to remember. She had remarried, had children, but she wanted him to know that she was sorry. For when they were children in Bronx, and for when they were young in Los Angeles. That final goodbye helped the old cracks in his heart start to close, and scar over.

After that record, he felt freer than he had in a long time, like he’d finally let go of the weight of those old, crushed hopes of his boyhood. He kept writing, kept preforming. Kept on living, despite the things, the people, the dreams, and the life he's had to leave behind.

**Author's Note:**

> Reviews and comments make me happy :) But no matter if you leave one or not, I hope you enjoyed reading.


End file.
